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Sunday, April 17, 2011

I've been working on a file manager written in Splore, and it's coming along great!

It's got a ton of great features working so far:

On top tabbed browsing

Ability to toggle removable media and hidden & system files

A treeview for each tab (or the option to share one)

Smart column sorting

Bookmarks with hotkeys

Ability to hide any button you want (and hotkeys that allow you navigate without them!

A status bar that reports how many files & folders are selected/in view (rather than "objects")

Junction & Hard Link detection

Different icons per filetype

Able to set custom icon for drives based off Autorun.inf

Different icons for Music, Documents, Pictures, etc

Pipe separated filter (e.g., "*.ini|*Bry*")

Ability to choose normal or custom Context Menu

In terms of features it doesn't have (yet?)....

Multiple panes (Sorry, but that would be way to much effort)

Micro$oft features like...

Libraries & Homegroup (Will anyone miss them?)

"Extra Large Icons" view ( :[ )

The Recyle Bin, Control Panel, and Network (if I can get it working, I will!)

Preview Pane (After it's stable, that's the next step!)

Search (if I am able, I'll try to integrate a search method that someone else has written in AHK)

Command Line Arguments (In the works!)

Clipboard support (In the works!)

Ability to remember last session & export sessions (In the works!)

A pretty UI (AHK really can't compete with 7's new looks; I'll do my best to make it shiny.)

Skins....? (We'll see!)

The only real limitation it has is that you have to be able to run Unicode. This is mostly for looks, but certain functions like the one used to extract icons are either ANSI or Unicode, and more importantly, the main way I implemented "smart" sorting is by using the Zero-Width Space Unicode character, which ANSI sees as a jumble of jibberish.

In terms of resources, Splore really isn't too much heavier than my other AHK programs (~5MB). The only thing that kind of makes me uneasy is that the more different types of files you view (specifically different EXEs, ICOs, ANIs, and CURs), the more memory it uses because it has to read those icons into memory. Even so, I just randomly clicked around for a few minutes into different folders with different types and I only say it jump around maybe 1MB increase. So it's still probably lighter than Explorer! With tabs! (Plus, I might add an option to disable per-filetype icons for systems with less resources, though this seems meaningless since they'd need Unicode.)

Also, on a pseudo-related note, I kind of tweaked the FreewareWire Software website so everything is not thrown on the sides. I've also been thinking about doing away with the single download page and just putting download links on each freeware's page. But that's also got me wondering about having just one download for the program and the source. What do you think? Do you like freeware that has the source bundled in with it, or do you like downloading it separately?

Also, still thinking for a name for PEM. I'm definitely not in a rush though because I'm probably going to wait to release it after AHKv2 releases so the source is more compatible for the user. (Assuming AHKv2 doesn't break any critical functionality). But still, if you have any ideas for names, please, e-mail me. I'm a human being, I will do my best to treat you as one as well, and you have nothing to lose.

-Bry

PS - If anyone graphically-inclined would want to make an icon for Splore, I'd be thrilled. I really have no idea on what the icon could be, but I'm pretty set on the name. Again: nothing to lose.